Search - Either/Orchestra :: Afro-Cubism

Who knew . . .

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 12/12/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

". . . that these boys from Boston would be able to pull off an authentic--nay--brilliant Afro-Cuban session? Look, some of these guys are pasty-white--about as Anglo as you can get. Surely, they're carpetbaggers, slumming in ethno-musicality to p(l)ump up their sagging little-big-band gig, what?Not!!From the initial scintillating piano notes of the first cut, "Harvey's Entrance," this is the real deal. I don't know how they do it! But they do!! They've got that loosy-goosy, swaying-in-the-breeze-coconut-palm-yet-way-jazzy thing absolutely down.For this music to work, it's almost as if your brain has to go on hold: You just give free rein to your affective self, the self that splashed in the warm tropic bosom of the Middle Passage and had no cares despite the fact that your forebears were Kings in Africa and you're part of a client culture. And that's what these guys do, gloriously--drench themselves in some kind of ur-Caribbean vibe and let the chips fall where they may. Yet. Yet. What about the Cubism part? Isn't there some kind of pretty smart, somewhat deconstructed vibe happening here? Yes.And that's the genius of it all--some bizarro mind over matter deal while absolutely retaining the stone-warm authentic Latin sensibility.If you can't feel the tropics in this music gloriously mapped onto smart postmodern jazz, if you're not there on the burning sands of Elutheria, of Cuba, of Curacao but still in the precincts of hip modern jazz, then, then, you're not alive."